1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to motherboards of electronic data processing devices like computers, e.g. PCs, and video data processing devices like personal video recorders, and further to personal video recorders and computers, e.g. PCs, equipped with such a motherboard.
2. Background Art
Referring now to FIG. 1, there is shown a motherboard 1 of a PC (personal computer) according to the prior art.
Typically, the motherboard 1 comprises a CPU 2, a mathematical co-processing component (CoPro 3), a Direct Memory Access component (DMA 4), a quartz or crystal oscillator 5, cache memory components 6, a RAM-BIOS component 7, several plug-in places or card slots 8, and memory banks 9, etc.
As can be seen from FIG. 1, the several components of the motherboard 1 are linked by one or several bus systems comprising e.g. respective data, address, and/or control buses, e.g., a PCI bus system 10.
Further, into the above memory bank 9, one or several SIMM modules can be plugged, each carrying several RAM components, e.g., respective DRAM (or VRAM) memory chips.
Further, into the plug-in places—optionally—one or several peripheral component cards can be plugged in, e.g., respective sound cards, video data processing cards, graphic data processing cards, modem cards, etc.
For example, a modem card (which might e.g. comprise one or several modem chips, and one or several memory chips, etc.) might e.g. control the data interchanged between the PC, and an external computer and/or telephone network, e.g. an Intranet, and/or the Internet (e.g. by use of a respective ISDN or DSL line), etc.
In addition, a graphic data processing card (which might e.g. comprise one or several non-programmable data processing chips, and one or several memory chips, etc.), for instance, might e.g. control the data interchanged between the PC, and a monitor connected thereto.
The prior art systems as described above have several disadvantages.
For instance, the relatively big distance between the card, and the components (e.g., the CPU 2) on the motherboard makes it difficult to use high data rates in the communication between the card, and the components (e.g., the CPU 2) on the motherboard. This is specially disadvantageous for real time processing.
Further, the plug-in connection between the card, and the motherboard might—e.g. due to signal reflections caused by the connection—lead to a relatively high distortion of the signals exchanged between the card, and the components on the motherboard.
Still further, the cards show little flexibility as to their functionality. If a different functionality is needed in general a different card has to be used.
Therefore, what is needed is new system and a new method, in particular, a new motherboard, with which the above and/or other drawbacks of the prior art might be overcome.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.